3-D HD in JOPPA
God's High Definition Vision for the Missional Church
Easter 5
Acts 11:1-18
Paul Swartz - May 2, 2010

Many Christians can name the hour and the place of their salvation. Some would point to a Billy Graham crusade, an altar call, a camp experience, or some sensitive moment in their life where they found themselves in special communion with God. For Reinhold Niebuhr, who was asked if he could name the time and place of his salvation, it was "2000 years ago on a dusty hill named Golgotha outside Jerusalem's wall."

In the spirit of Niebuhr's calculation, perhaps we can say that Acts 11:1-18 also qualifies as one of those timeless and defining moments in human salvation that is determinative in every Christian's life. For were it not for this development (reported in Acts 10 and recalled in Acts 11) the odds for our being here this morning are neglible. What is described in Acts is the move from a small Jewish sect to a faith that is open to all of us whose lineage is not Jewish, but Gentile. We have the drive and movement of the Holy Spirit to thank for this.

We are going to work through Acts 11:1-18. (We will be reading from the TNIV: Today’s New International Version). But at the beginning of the message I am just going to read verse 17. 

"So if God gave the Gentiles the same gift He gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could stand in God's way?" This is the Word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God.)  

One of the unanswered questions in the economy today is whether it will again be technology that leads us out of the recession. Will 3-D HDTV be a 'hot' boon or a bust?... Our passage today clearly suggests that a 3-D Vision in Joppa gave impetus to the young Church by providing God’s High Definition Vision for the Missional Church, and a surge resulted that would establish the Church of Jesus Christ as a prominent world-wide faith. Our passage begins this way: verse 1

The apostles and the believers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the Word of God.

Here is what is going on. Up until this point all of the Christians, with few exceptions were Jews. That is, all the men were circumcised, the Christians were attending their local synagogues, adhering to Jewish dietary laws, and strictly keeping the Sabbath. To a great extent, they did not look any different from their fellow Jews except that they had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah talked about in the Old Testament. Non-Jews who chose to follow underwent instruction, and after they submitted to the rite of circumcision, were welcomed. In other words, Gentiles had to first become a Jew in order to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

Now when the Jewish believers in Jerusalem hear that Gentiles had also become believers in Jesus Christ and  received the Holy Spirit without the ritual of becoming Jews, they summoned Peter to the headquarters.   

I suppose this would be like hearing on the news today that a number of Islamic leaders had become Christians but intended to continue also in their Muslim traditions. We would respond. “Come again? Hmm . . . Muslim/Christians . . . that might  be good but it sounds a bit odd.” 

Obviously, Peter has some explaining to do: Verses 2-3:

So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, "You went into the house of the uncircumcised and ate with them."

Peter is greeted with skepticism. “How do you get the idea that it is okay to disregard 2000 years of tradition of not eating in a Gentile home?” “What gives you the right to think you can single handedly change the direction of our Jewish sect? Who do you think you are? The Pope?” Ouch! 

As a pastor, I could have told Peter that people in the church don’t like change. There is the old pastor’s legend about the pastor who wanted to move the piano to the other side of the sanctuary and the way he got away with it was by moving it an inch every week. 

Erik Erikson once said, change is hard because “all change is perceived as loss.” None of us like change when it is imposed on us. The business community recognizes this, and has produced lots of literature on leading change in organizations. 

Peter, welcome to the church! If Peter faced criticism and the first apostles had trouble discerning the church’s direction, of course we will too. Fortun-ately the rest of the passage gives us some direction on moving forward together. Peter begins by telling the story of his own experience. “This is what happened to me.” I think this is often the best place for us to begin. Peter  doesn’t play the authority card. “I’m Peter, an apostle. This is the way it is.” No, he tells the story of how he has seen God move and invites others to draw their own conclusions:  verses 4-5

Starting from the beginning, Peter told them the whole story:  "I was in the city of Joppa praying…

Now from chapter 10 we learn that Peter was staying at the home of Simon the tanner. What? A good Jew in the house of a Gentile—that was offense enough—but one who made himself “unclean”  by handling dead carcuses?  It was here that  “Peter went up on the roof to pray.” 

It begins here! Peter makes himself available to God. He creates space for God to speak to him. We do not know what Peter was praying but we can look back to Acts 4:29 and hear this prayer by Peter:  “Now, Lord, . . . even though there are threats against us, enable Your servants to speak Your Word with great boldness.”

What would it mean for this congregation to go up to the roof to pray? To participate in the Prayer Vigil a week before Pentecost and our Anniversary Celebration, May 14 and 15th? Might we pray that the Lord enable us to faithfully follow His guidance, His purpose, and despite our concerns, to gratefully acknowledge His wide embrace of all  people, to give thanks for the privilege of being disciples that not only affirm and speak about what Jesus has done for us individually and as a congregation, with great boldness, but are also actively expressing that gratitude through our giving and loving service?

Prayer is where it starts. Let’s read what happens next:  verse 5  

5 and in a trance I saw a vision.

Peter says that he fell into a trance. Now, you might think that Peter is super-spiritual here to have had a vision but the text seems to me to lessen that quite a bit. In the previous chapter (10:9-11) we’re told it was "about noon...and Peter became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance."  Peter goes on:

Verses 5-10: "I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles and birds. Then I heard a voice telling me, 'Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.' "I replied, 'Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.' "The voice spoke from heaven a second time, 'Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.'” This happened three times, and then it was all pulled up to heaven again.

There it is again! Peter. After making bold and boisterous confessions and claims “You are the Messiah,”  “I will never forsake you,” (Matt. 16:23) he denies his Lord three times. As if to erase those denials, the Risen Christ asks Peter three times, “Do you love Me?” Like Doris Brinkman’s capturing Thomas’ “Ahaa!” response in seeing the wounds on the Risen Christ, affirming “My Lord and My God!” And now we have Peter seeing this 3-D vision three times, and he still doesn’t fully get its significance.

It’s noon. Peter is hungry. He smells the food cooking and he is trying to pray. And he has a vision of food being lowered down to him. Not only that, but it is food that would break his diet. Juicy shimmering slices of ham being lowered down in front of him on a tablecloth. Now is that our experience of prayer or what? Being distracted by food, our physical surroundings, thinking of ourselves and our own needs, struggling probably to stay awake . . . And when God tells us to do  something we say, “Surely not, Lord!” Isn’t the Bible refreshingly frank about what we humans are like? Make yourselves available by praying! God knows our prayers may be marred by weakness and selfishness and hard-headedness, but He can still move through our stubbornness and self-centeredness. Listen, just listen!  

So Peter wakes up. “Wow, that was a nightmare. That was really weird. I have got to get some food in my stomach and get off this roof and out of the sun.” As he is still pondering what the vision meant, a knock on the door shakes him even more: verses 11-12

"Right then three men who had been sent to me from Caesarea stopped at the house where I was staying. The Spirit told me to have no hesitation about going with them. 

Three men from Cornelius, the centurion, show up and ask Peter to go to this Gentile’s house. Now Cornelius was a God-fearing Gentile who attends the local synagogue and liberally supports Jewish charities. He is investing his money where he really wants his heart to be, though he has not yet undergone the ritual induction (circumcision) into Judaism. “Now that is a weird coincidence,”  thinks Peter. “I was just telling God that I would not eat Gentile food even though He was telling me to. When I wake up I immediately get an invitation to a Gentile’s home.”  

No wonder he feels the Spirit is telling him to go with them. Don’t we, at times wish it were that clear? I guess I would just say to you (and to me), Mark Twain’s quote about the Bible, "It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand." 

G.K. Chesterton put it even better, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” 

I can speak for myself and say that reading/studying Scripture often convicts me of things I should have done or could do for others. You should know that every sermon I have ever preached has been preached to this preacher many times before you hear it! And I confess that it often takes more than three times to “get it.”

“But,” you might ask, “what if, like Peter, we feel like we are being led to do something a bit unconventional? It seems like we could get in trouble if everyone was running around doing things we felt the Spirit had told us to do.”

What happens next in the story? Peter invites six other Christian Jewish believers to go with him: Verse 12  

"These six brothers also went with me, and we entered the man's house." These brothers, Chapter 10 tells us are “believers from Joppa.”   Seven believers are enough to change the world! Peter gets six fellow believers to go explore what God is doing – to visit some outsiders. So what happens when Peter and the seven believers show up? 

Peter says: verses 13-17,

The centurion told us how he had seen an angel appear in his house and say, 'Send to Joppa for Simon who is called Peter. He will bring you a message through which you and all your household will be saved.'

"As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them as he had come on us at the beginning. Then I remembered what the Lord had said: 'John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.'  So if God gave them the same gift he gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could stand in God's way?"

We know from Acts 10 that Peter’s sermon about Jesus is quite simple. God loves all people--no matter who they are! He wants to bring healing to their broken lives. He wants to bring peace. Jesus went around doing good. He was crucified and raised from the dead. Everyone who believes in Him finds forgiveness of sins and new life…now and forever. 

The book of Acts is short for its traditional title “The Acts of the Apostles,” but as many Bible readers have commented throughout the ages, it really might better have been titled, “The Acts of the Holy Spirit.” This is Peter’s point exactly in this story. “Look this was not me. This was not my idea to reach the Gentiles. This was far too “Master-full” in how we were brought together. An angel, preparing them for my visit, told Cornelius to send for me and even gave him directions to where I was lodging (Acts10:5-6). I had a vision while I was praying just when they were arriving at Simon the tanner’s. My initial response to the vision was ‘Surely not, Lord!’” (vs 8). God had been working in both our lives.  I brought other believers along to corroborate what was happening – to testify that this was a God-thing not a Peter-being-impetuous thing! They were as astonished as I was when the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:45) then came upon the Gentiles after my basic Jesus sermon. This was beyond me. You may call it just a series of coincidences. You might think the devil made me do it but I’m telling you that I believe the Spirit made me do it. After  this all happened, I remembered a saying by Jesus that suggested this kind of thing would happen.”

Peter concludes to those who initially criticized him for initiating this innovation, “What was I supposed to do? Who was I to think that I could stand in God's way?" (Acts 11:17). Peter’s listeners in Jerusalem were persuaded. Verse 18:

When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God, saying, "So then, even to Gentiles God has granted repentance that leads to life."

The Spirit of Jesus Christ is in the business of challenging believers to leave their comfort zone to proclaim the basic message of Jesus Christ to all. He is not content to let geographic, demographic, and social barriers keep people from hearing the Good News. God so often chooses people whom we would never choose. The very ones we choose to ignore or exclude may be the very ones through whom God intends bless us. He’s always surprising that way. He does not go by the rules of the politically correct and the socially acceptable. We must expect the unexpected with God. We, too, will discover that we will receive unexpected blessings if we will respond to God’s leadership and pursue His vision for us, and if we have a high level of expectation regarding what God can do in us and through us.

Peter and his Jewish believing friends had to be jolted by the Spirit out of their internal focus. Like Peter, we need to follow God’s lead. It will require setting aside our personal agendas and seek God’s will for the Church. Think of what Peter would have missed and experienced if he had not been faithful! Who are we to stand in God’s way? Don’t our biases often prevent us from opening our lives to the renewing presence of God?  We are fearful of changes that might be required so we close our hearts to God’s nudgings. Out of fear of the unknown or a stubborn refusal to grow in new directions, we refuse to risk the vulnerability that is required if we are to be truly open to God.

I wonder how many blessings we miss out on because we stubbornly refuse to hear the messages God sends our way. Instead of seeking to determine God’s will for our lives, we seek God’s approval for what we want to do. We limit God’s purpose for us with our lack of vision and our lack of expectancy about what God can do in and through us.

Have you been listening to how God is prodding you to make a one-time most generous Anniversary Gift to strengthen and further His mission through King of Glory so that we can more fully become the HIGH DEFINITION VISION God has for us. Let me acknowledge that there are many “rational” reasons why you might think you’re not capable of giving what God is suggesting to you and expecting from you. But let me share with you the other side of that coin. When we are open to God’s leadership, give where we want our heart to be, the Christian life becomes exciting and unpredictable. As we learn to trust in God’s direction for our lives, including our pocketbooks, we will discover blessings and new meaning for our lives that far surpass our greatest expectations.

It is time for disciples here to learn to live with expectancy and hopefulness about what God has planned for us…not what we have pre-determined. If we genuinely trust in God’s provision, we will be excited about what the future holds for us. Regardless of the circumstances of our lives, we can look to the future with great anticipation about the things God will teach us and the ways in which God will sustain our every need. God’s unexpected ways and God’s impeccable timing leave you wondering why you were ever reluctant to relinquish control in the first place.

In this 50^th Anniversary Year let us be about being  that Acts church that is Spirit-led—open and responsive to our Lord’s direction—willing to venture, to let go and let God, to make sacrifices and take risks for the sake of Him who gave Himself for all  and entrusted to us that awesome privilege of being His Heart, Hands, and Voice!

We have been GATHERED IN FAITH, and now with the Spirit’s urging, let us be about launching into our second half of our first century convinced that our God is way ahead of us, and though we like Peter and the first disciples, are His simple, flawed messengers, we are nevertheless SENT IN HOPE!  AMEN!